Stop Confusing Marketing Activity With Marketing Impact

Marketing departments are extremely good at producing large numbers. We can report how many social posts were published, how many emails were sent, how many impressions a campaign generated and how many people visited a website. Those numbers are useful, but they can also create an illusion of success if nobody stops to ask what actually changed because of the activity.

This is something I have become much more conscious of as my marketing thinking has developed. Earlier in my career, producing the output often felt like the achievement. The website went live, the campaign was delivered or the social content performed well. I still think execution matters enormously, but I increasingly want to connect those outputs to an objective that exists beyond the marketing department.

If the objective is membership growth, I want to know what happened to memberships. If we are promoting an event, registrations and attendance matter. If we want to build awareness, then we need some reasonable way of understanding whether awareness has increased. If a campaign is designed to encourage a particular behaviour, our evaluation should try to tell us something about that behaviour.

The Aberystwyth Town website gave me one of the clearest examples of this. Rather than simply celebrating page views after launch, we were able to see more than £2,200 generated through the website within the first four weeks and more than 150 customer records created. Those measures told us that people were actually doing something through the platform. The website had become part of the commercial operation rather than simply a communications channel.

Other campaigns require different measures. Working with a client recently the content reached more than 10,000 people on socials and the accompanying article received more than 300 reads. Those figures give useful information about distribution and engagement, but they are not automatically proof that the campaign changed people's understanding of the product. The next stage is deciding what we ultimately wanted that communication to achieve and whether there are better ways of assessing it.

That distinction is important because not everything worthwhile can be tied directly to immediate revenue. Brand-building activity, reputation, awareness and long-term behaviour can be difficult to attribute neatly. I do not believe marketers should pretend otherwise simply because somebody would like a perfect ROI figure for every social post.

What we can do, however, is become much more disciplined about setting objectives before the work begins. If the objective is clear, we have a much better chance of choosing meaningful measurements afterwards. If it is not clear, marketing reports tend to become a search for whichever number happens to look most impressive.

Activity tells me that marketing happened. Impact tells me whether it mattered. The more senior I become as a marketer, the more interested I am in the second question.